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Divergent Temporalities in the Anthropocene

May 2025

It is indisputable that we are living through an era quite different from that of our ancestors; one in which human technological development has much more significant implications for the world around us than ever before. Many scholars have argued that this period must be characterized as something fundamentally distinct from the “Holocene”—the epoch previously used to describe the ongoing era.¹ New scientific terminology has been developed in order to address this issue, and the modern period has thus been dubbed the “Anthropocene”. The concept of the “Anthropocene” was first introduced to the world of academia in the early 2000s, popularized by a text co-authored by meteorologist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer titled “The ‘Anthropocene’”.² Crutzen and Stoermer’s essay proposed that the dawn of the Anthropocene be recognized as the beginning of the late 18th century, as this marked the start of an era during which “the global effects of human activities [had] become clearly noticeable”³ and mankind entered “an epoch in which humans [were] the dominant drivers of geologic change on the globe”.⁴ A heated debate has emerged between professors in both the sciences and humanities regarding the language used to describe this time period (most notably the aforementioned “Anthropocene”), highlighting the interdisciplinary importance of the idea.⁵

Justifying Epistemological Critique

Though many scholars also contest the specific dates encasing this time period, this analysis will be conducted within the context of the original definition. The scientific accuracy of the “Anthropocene” as a geological phenomenon is not of particular relevance; this paper represents an interrogation of the proposed eras’ epistemological roots and hypothetical consequences of its use in practice. Dr. Liam Stanley, Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield University, states that critique is a prerequisite to policy action. He explains that the philosophical underpinnings of political perspectives are not expressed solely through interaction with philosophical literature, but also implicitly conveyed through methodological policy conclusions. “Epistemological decisions,” according to Stanley, “generate ontological assumptions.”.⁶ Giuliana Mannu, a PhD professor in intercultural communication ethics at the University of Sassari writes, “The contribution of the philosophical and sociological disciplines is crucial in reflections on the politics of nature,”, contextualizing the aforementioned ethical framework to the intersection of sociopolitics and climate discussion. She also emphasizes the centrality of communal remembrance to ethical decision making, claiming that “no moral act could be possible without the role of the social community within the natural environment,”.⁷

Within the field of critical theory—the focus of this paper—scholars have identified many problematic assumptions embedded in the narrative constructed by a distinctive “Anthropocene” era.⁸ Chief among these is its tendency to erase the dynamic interactions between non-Western populations and their surrounding environments prior to the Industrial Revolution via temporal disruption. The Anthropocene is much more than a metric of geological time, but instead a settler colonialist political project designed to obscure historical colonial violence and legitimize settler futures.⁹

Colonial Modernity

The Anthropocene itself is defined by a process of terraforming involving dramatic alteration of the natural environment.¹⁰ This is, in and of itself, the ultimate goal of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism seeks to erase all traces of Indigeneity in order to create a blank canvas of land upon which the settlers can establish their own ecology and homeland.¹¹ The objective of settler colonialism is absolute domination and reconfiguration, and climate control enables a dramatic means by which the land can be transformed.¹² Thus, the historic construction of colonialism and the modern environment are intimately intertwined. To suggest that these conditions of the status quo are in any way separate from the structures that preceded them would be an awkward cleaving of modernity’s roots, leaving behind an incoherent teleology that privileges the settler state. Colonialism is the superstructure that frames the modern world; it is also the very force that sustains capitalism. Capitalism relies on exploitation and extractivism, two processes that are directly facilitated by colonial practices. It is the inequality generated by colonial dispossession that “severed peoples’ access to land and resources to sustain their livelihoods” that forces subjugated populations to provide the very labor that powers modern extraction and industrial development.”.¹³ However, it is imperative to recognize that racial subordination (most prominently anti-Blackness) and colonialism are inextricably bound together. The relationship between colonialism and racism is symbiotic; the colonial empire sustains itself by enforcing racial subordination as a means through which to generate labor, and colonialism is the structure that exports European conceptions of racial hierarchy.¹⁴ In his book *Black Skin, White Masks*, Frantz Fanon explains his theories regarding the way in which colonial structures reproduce racial inequality through systemic discrimination,¹⁵ and he worked at the forefront of post-colonial studies throughout his late 20th century. In fact, he is famously regarded as the “father of decolonization”.¹⁶

Temporal Discontinuity

In establishing an entirely new epoch to explain modern climate conditions, the Anthropocene narrative positions issues of social justice rooted in historical processes like colonialism and slavery as problems of the past. The assertion that we have entered a “new” era necessarily severs modernity from the conditions that enabled its creation, positioning those processes within the context of the “old” times. Elisa Randazzo and Hannah Richter, lecturers in politics at the University College London and University of Sussex respectively, develop a working definition to describe this phenomenon’s existence within Anthropocene scholarship.¹⁷ They refer to it as the “discontinuous-descriptive” approach, which describes an Anthropocene history “in terms of the progressive development of the human species” and a narrative that “cuts off acknowledgement of the ‘Anthropocene past’ as a…history of political struggles”.¹⁸ Rebecca R. Scott, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Missouri, articulates this argument very explicitly in her book *Land of Extraction: Property, Fracking, and Settler Colonialism*. “The past is erased by the future,” Scott writes, “by a singular moment of transition that negates the past.”.¹⁹ Scott’s quote elucidates the way in which this model of temporality is thus “discontinuous”; it ruptures traditionally teleological understandings of history that recognizes causal connections between events, and instead establishes modernity as an unprecedented phenomenon. This causes sociopolitical issues with roots in historical processes to “lose importance in the face of the fast and drastic changes of the anthropocentric Earth”.²⁰

Urgency as Obfuscation

Furthermore, this incomplete understanding of temporality has created an Anthropocene discourse that uses the illusion of impending disaster²¹ to craft a narrative that fails to be “attentive to the historical continuity of dispossession and disaster caused by the empire”.²² In his article “Energy Geographies in/of the Anthropocene: Where Now?” Ankit Kumar, a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Sheffield University, further elaborates on “the risk posed by the urgency discourse” as an imperialist distraction tactic. Kumar writes. Andrew Baldwin, a professor of geography at Durham University, examines the intersections of race, nature, and colonialism in his article “Introduction: Whiteness, Coloniality, and the Anthropocene”. Baldwin explains that the Anthropocene is not inherently virtuous, but rather that it is only “when scrubbed clean of its particularity” that “the Anthropocene acquire[s] its unmarked universality”.²³ In short—it is *because* the Anthropocene is detached from the colonial context it was born out of that it can be presented as a neutral, universally applicable narrative.²⁴

Articulating an Alternative

The continuous/discontinuous model of the Anthropocene represents a complex phenomenon, but the terms themselves are very simple: the aforementioned dichotomy simply distinguishes between narratives that pose a continuous, perpetually existing timeline, and those that recognize a discontinuous split between “before” and “after” the Anthropocene era “began”. When developing an alternative to the discontinuous Anthropocene, forwarding a continuous-ontological understanding seems like an intuitive option. This label describes the theoretical acceptance of an essentially “unknowable” Anthropocene in the name of recognizing the racialized context it exists within: the embracement of a form of geopower that is mysteriously all-encompassing.²⁵ However, a continuous approach unintentionally perpetuates an extreme form of post-colonialism, where native ways of knowing are mystified and become ambiguous to those outside of the community.²⁶ This represents a depoliticizing colonialist mechanism that unintentionally reinforces the “externality” of Indigenous peoples’ (as they are realized to be incompatible with broader Western narratives), and thus degrades the academy’s “ability to fully comprehend and analyse [Indigenous] communities”.²⁷ The effects of this are intuitively harmful; if neo-colonialism cannot be recognized and thoroughly examined, then it also cannot be confronted. Thus, when constructing a preferable historical consciousness to that of the Anthropocene, it seems ideal to locate it somewhere around the half-way point between the “continuous” and “discontinuous” perspectives. This calls for a worldview that “embraces ontological relationality and non-human agency” while remaining fluid enough to “become comfortable with clashing political demands and be genuinely open to alterity”.²⁸

While these requirements sound almost paradoxical, Zoe Todd—a Métis anthropologist and scholar of Indigenous studies—has theorized a decolonial counter-discourse adhering to the guidelines outlined above.²⁹ In their article “Indigenizing the Anthropocene”, Todd recommends the employment of a competing philosophical framework (to the Anthropocene) composed of two ideas presented by Dwayne Donald, a Papaschase Cree scholar. Todd combines Donald’s concept of “ethical relationality” (what Todd articulates as an “approach to our position as humans…rooted in balance and reciprocity”) and a research sensibility termed “Indigenous Métissage”, meaning the “ethical imperative to recognize…how our histories and experiences are layered and position us in relation to each other”.³⁰

However, this framework remains inadequate in isolation; it fails to account for the unique challenges experienced by those within Black bodies. The structural and deeply pervasive nature of anti-Blackness requires an ontology specifically designed to combat it, or a “post-apocalyptic world without any signs of ethical transformation”³¹ will inevitably emerge regardless of our efforts against it. Todd and Donald's aforementioned relationality is not yet applicable to the Black reality as it assumes that human relationships are relatively tangible, a condition that does not ring true in the context of Black being. Axelle Karera, a professor in the philosophy department at Emory University, argues that Whiteness (as a broader system of power) is incapable of distinguishing between “blackened” life and death. As long as Blackness is rendered “unregistrable”, it will remain “un-grievable”.³² This necessitates the integration of the revolutionary methodology described within Vivaine Saleh-Hanna’s *Black Feminist Hauntology*. Saleh-Hanna, Director of Black Studies and professor of Crime & Justice studies at UMass Dartmouth, advocates the abolition of White-ologies by deconstructing continued legacies of Whiteness³³. She describes this structural shape-shifting as an approach facilitated by intergenerational, ancestral relationality that transcends Western conceptions of temporality. Only by acknowledging the ancient roots of modern violence can we resist the “enforced forgetfulness”³⁴ necessary to maintain white supremacy. This very same process also reinscribes the power of the settler state, and represents an integral element of colonial practice.³⁵ Emerita Professor of History at the University of Auckland, Judith Binney, directly addresses the manipulation and mutilation of historical truth by the imperial machinery of empire.³⁶ This process is easily recognizable in the context of the Anthropocene: the imperialist state envisions itself leaving the Holocene era (and its related socio-political components) in the past and entering the Anthropocene, framing its routine practice of settlerist amnesia as recognition of mankind’s technological advancement. “The ‘telling of history’, whether it be oral or written, is not and never has been neutral. It is always the reflection of the priorities of the narrators and their perceptions of their world,” Binney explains in “Maori Oral Narratives, Pakeha Written Texts: Two Forms of Telling History".³⁷ She also makes a more explicit claim regarding the underlying motivations of said institutional involvement, specifically regarding the alteration of indigenous peoples' lived experiences without consent. “Western-trained historians…have been perpetuating colonialist attitudes in their so-called objective histories….these histories have served, to a considerable extent, to erase Maori memories and perceptions.”³⁸ Binney’s analysis verifies that imperial knowledge systems' compulsion to intentionally forget³⁹ is a thinly veiled settler move to innocence⁴⁰—the settler’s attempt to assuage their own guilt—greased by the anesthetizing and innocuous nature of the Anthropocene narrative.

Relationality & Reciprocal Obligation

Thus, it becomes obvious that an approach involving a method of relationality grounded in the philosophy of Indigenous Métissage (but implemented within the cross-generational context established by Saleh-Hanna) would be most effective at destabilizing the settler state. The intersection of these ideologies lies within many non-Western cosmologies, such as the belief systems of the indigenous Polynesian peoples or various Afro-diasporic communities.⁴¹ These groups partake in undeniably distinct spiritual practices, but are similar in their understandings of the relationship between the past and present. Time is perceived non-linearly, and the present is seen to be a “cyclic renewal of the past”.⁴² This perspective aligns with the Black feminist call for “asymmetrical reciprocity”⁴³, “rememory”, and direct engagement with one's “inherited past”.⁴⁴ When a paradigm of Indigenous Métissage is framed through an understanding of hauntological obligation to both the future and the past, it fosters potential for transformative justice to take place. The combination of these research praxes establishes a relational ethic that can inform and supplement future discourse, rather than an alternative chronology designed to replace the Anthropocene. This enables the development of a historical consciousness that acknowledges the implications of our distinctive relationships to others (in the past, present, and future) and leaves room for the incorporation of Indigenous scholarship—without collapsing down to a totalizing, oversimplified narrative.

References

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